Talk:Watch Out Now/@comment-3575890-20150327122717
Not for nothing, if there's one scene that Damon haters keep revisiting in support of their hatred for him, it's the Jeremy debacle. I would like to clarify that I am not a defender of Damon's shitty actions. No matter how much I love him, I have never viewed him through rose-colored goggles and never will because his monumental flaws is largely part of the reason he's my favorite. My being the fan of a character with a skewed moral compass does not mean I have a skewed moral compass. I operate by a value system that completely contradicts with Damon's way of life and attitude, and when he fucks up, and he often does, I do not sweep any of it under the carpet. I HATE the Jeremy debacle as much as anyone. What Damon did was downright reprehensible. However, this was also four seasons ago back when Damon was somebody else entirely so I honestly don't even see how this argument is applicable anymore. That Damon was caught in a perpetual cycle of deepest self-loathing and destruction, and had no regard for anything or anyone. That Damon had not yet fully regained his humanity. That Damon, no matter how people want to twist it, was not the same man that Damon is now, which is a man that not only puts Elena before himself every time, but also loves Jeremy like a brother and has offered his own life for Jeremy's. Yet personal reservations put aside, I wholly understood even that Damon and feel obligated to speak on behalf of him. Now before I get further into this, do not mistake me. I know that Damon's actions being in the past do not erase the history of those actions. Damon will always be accountable for the loss of many innocent lives and most heinous crimes (need I remind, Damon is a fucking vampire that absolutely cannot ever be held to the same moral standards as human beings, but that's neither here nor there). The monster Damon was will always be a part of him. I do not deny any of this. However, I would argue that Damon's actions came from so much more than a place of malice. The haters want to twist it like Damon snapped Jeremy's neck to punish Elena for rejecting him, but it's not as simple as all that. In the past, Elena rejected Damon multiple times and he never lashed out violently. It was not the principle of being rejected that fuelled Damon's vampiric knee-jerk impulse to snap Jeremy's neck; it was the despair the rejection brought about in that pinpoint time frame. Centuries' worth of pent up hurt feelings had reached a pinnacle of a most indescribable pain that Damon couldn't hold in. Moments earlier, his entire world had shattered upon the woman he had come to base his entire life around -whom he invested more than half of his lifetime into - rejecting him in the most cold and callous manner with intent to hurt him for her personal amusement. (I cannot with people that ship Datherine. I really cannot because the emotional/mental abuse and overall toxicity is so monumental) Always bent in his belief that nobody could ever love him, his innermost feelings of self worthlessness had just reinforced themselves to the greatest extent when the one person he had thought loved him, confessed she didn't and never had. It urged him to think, what does it say about him when even the supposed love of his life wants nothing to do with him? He was beyond crushed and in a drunken haze thereafter turned to Elena for comfort. When she rejected him - while vindictiveness might have been part of it, after all this is Damon Salvatore circa early season two we are talking about - at the root of it, his motive was much more complex than petty spite the way some people try to play it off. First of all, it's not so much that Damon wanted to hurt Elena, as he wanted to hurt himself by having her hate him. Thereafter, even Elena understood his intentions: he wanted her to hate him because he believed it was what he deserved. He hated himself so vehemently and intensely, that he believed he did not deserve to be cared for by somebody as pure of heart and selfless as Elena Gilbert, and in his fear of getting hurt, he wanted to sever his emotional tie to Elena. So he gave her a reason to hate him that he knew there would be no going back from later: he "killed" her brother. Thankfully, Jeremy's death didn't stick and Damon's actions had no long-term consequences. Beyond his intentions of alienating himself from Elena though, there was also Jeremy himself who influenced his decision to "kill" him. Prior to snapping Jeremy's neck, Damon had glimpsed a deep, earth shattering pain in Jeremy that hit close to home for him. He saw a boy who was hurting as much as he was and had the immediate instinct to put him out of his misery. He had known Jeremy had vampire blood in his system and would thus turn if he killed him, so out of some twisted belief that he was doing Jeremy a favor, he took his life with intent to restore it with what at the time Damon had perceived to be the most precious gift of all - immortality. As a vampire, Jeremy would have the ability to shut off the pain at will and Damon decided to afford him that option. Just as he once erased Jeremy's memories to free him of his grief, he made the conscious choice to "free" him from the pain that came with mortality and humanity. It was undoubtedly amoral, but it's crucial to note that Damon has long since been predisposed to think that the only way to live is to cease to feel. That feelings and self preservation cannot coexist. He was a monster who had not yet known what it was like to be loved the way he loved and yearned to be loved. Damon haters, in their inability to understand Damon on a more in depth psychological level, fail to grasp that Damon acted not to punish Elena, but to punish himself by doing the only thing he could think of to drive the one person that cared about him far away from him whilst as an afterthought, liberating a heartbroken boy from his suffering out of a sense of poorly intentioned pity. Beyond that, they never bother to look at him beyond a surface level, which is truly a disservice as Damon is a very complex and psychological character. They continually oversimplify his motives, when nothing Damon does is ever for a single-faceted reason, and they never bother to understand the depths at which his mind works. In order to understand Damon, you really have to be able to put yourself into a headspace way beyond the realm of your personal line of thinking. He is not always easy to understand or to like for that matter, but he is an enigma of a character meant to be analyzed and perceived through a three-dimensional lens. And for as long as adamant haters refuse to step outside their comfort zone to do Damon this solid, they're missing out on the single most fascinating and complex character this show has ever seen. Now on that heavy ass note, I leave you all with this GIF of snarky Damon to further drive home the point that, quite simply, my husband is fucking adorable.